How Hosting Contests Can Boost Your Beat Sales

What’s going music producers, it’s Curtiss King of airbit.com here today to explain to you how hosting your own contest as a music producer can help boost your beat sales.

Let’s go

Music producers, I know you probably seen a million and one contest and maybe you have the same opinion I had about them before I started to actually host my own contest. They’re cheesy, they’re time wasting, they’re just ploys to get people to spend money, they’re annoying, they’re long, they’re whatever. I don’t know whatever adjectives else that you have for that, but I didn’t understand the value of contest and how it could really drive traffic to what you’re doing.

Lemme give you an example. Now, I had a contest a few years back in which, one of the, I forget the actual goal of the contest, but I remember I put a beat out there and I gave my customers the opportunity to get a free beat and basically, I know what it was, it was called the my story campaign. So, basically, I had a beat called my story, it was made for storytelling and what I did was I made it available, you know, you basically pay 5 bucks to have access to this beat, right? You rap over it, and it basically will be your opportunity to tell your story, use a special hashtag, which was, I think my story ckb and then you had to put cutisskingbeats.com and basically when I did that, I had rappers who got the beat and was like yeah, I’ll take a $5 pretty much a lease. And I did count it as a lease. I’ll take a $5 lease from Curtiss King beats, sure I’ll do that.

They did that, they rapped over the beat, they shared it, they started to see competition, they started to feel that blood competition brings you and then they started to put their art out there. Some people even submitted more than once and what happened was that, I made it a mandatory thing for the voting system to include their fans. Now, all of a sudden, I had complete strangers who were sharing curtisskingbeats.com the URL along with the hashtag, who had never even known who I was and because those friends also had other rappers who were friends with them. They went and checked the people out, they checked the contest out, they wanted to be a part of it. And this is the nature of when you conduct a contest in the right way, this is the nature of what it can bring you. This is the results of what it can bring you is what I meant to say.

Like for example, I have a producer friend of mine that goes by Bruce and I think he has the Bruce2k challenge where basically he puts a beat out there, he floats it out and then he gives rappers the opportunity to rap on it specifically on Instagram, they rap their bars over a minute. And if people decide once he takes that contest, takes that particular contestant and he takes that entry and puts on his Instagram, his people vote on it and say yo this is fire or this is not fire. And then once they decide which one is fire, I think this person gets a free beat or just something of the sort but that sort of conversation is what you wanna have going around your brand. Especially if you’re trying to get your name out there. You know, nothing really drives people faster than free. Nothing drives them faster than free and talented at the same time, you have the opportunity now when you put that out there for these folks to look at it and be like, I’m gonna do my own challenge. I wanna be a part of that.

So, ask yourself, what is it that you can do? What is it that you can create today, that will have people who wouldn’t have even thought about your particular brand or what you represent. Now, they’re completely in tune, they’re seeing other people who are competing in this, what can you do to really ball up that boil up that blood of competition? What can you do to put yourself at the centre point of all this? You know, there’s many different producers out here, who understand the value of it, but they don’t always find the way to sort of find that tipping point that actually makes the contest itself go viral which is beautiful for you because wherever that flyer goes that has your particular contest and I do suggest that you make a flyer for it. So that you can clearly explain the details of the contest so people know what they’re buying into. You know, if you have a flyer that goes around like that and circulate in your name. It’s almost like putting a flyer out there that says curtisskingbeats.com please circulate this around. You’re doing that and they’re doing it willingly and they’re paying you for that.

You know, I had so many contestants that it was a few hundred bucks that I actually got just generally from the entry fees alone. So, what I was able to do is take a portion of that and put it towards the promotion of the actual contest, I ran some ads on sound click, I ran some ads on my website and that particular campaign is what brought more people in the conversation that never would have been a part of it. So, really sit there, and get your notepad out, get your handy dandy notebook and your pen and start to think about ways that a contest can benefit you. I agree with them 100%.